Homework.

Oscar has a class later today at the local nature center, organized by the parish homeschooling co-op.    At the end of last month’s class about trees and leaves, the naturalist assigned some options for "homework," one of which was to draw an accurate picture of a leaf.  (I forgot about it; Oscar remembered, and produced his drawing yesterday.)

As we were driving in the car today, Oscar asked me:  "What’s ‘homework?’"

I started to answer, It’s schoolwork you do at home, then thought — no, wait, we do almost all our schoolwork at home.  That isn’t going to make any sense.

So after a minute I said, "Sometimes, kids who go away from their houses all day to a school building to do their school work — you know, on the school bus — at the end of the day, their teachers give them more work that they are supposed to take home with them to do at their house.  They finish that work and they take it back to school and give it to the teacher in the morning.  That’s called ‘homework’ because it’s the part of their work they do at home."

I tilted the rearview mirror to look at his face.  He was looking out the window, thinking about it.

"And the teacher at the nature center class calls it ‘homework’ when he asks you to do some work at home to get ready for the class, because it’s work that you do at home, too."

He didn’t say anything else.  I didn’t either, because the thought struck me that, when you put it that way, the notion of ‘homework’ seems completely absurd.  You mean that the kids leave the house in the morning, they don’t come back till late afternoon, and they STILL aren’t DONE yet?!? 

I guess it’s what you are used to.  It seemed normal to me when I was growing up.  Undoubtedly it seems normal to all the families with children that do homework every night.   But from where I’m sitting now, it looks like just another drain on already-stressed families.  Why can’t they get the work done in six hours of school?  Why send more home?   

I can see, maybe, an ideal whereby kids and parents will sit down and discuss the homework, parents will get to know how their kids are doing and kids can seek help from their parents, and it would be a few compensating moments of togetherness after a long day of separation… but does that really happen anywhere?  In many families, children’ll do it alone in their rooms (that was me).  In others, there’s so much chaos at home that they won’t be able to concentrate.   

But you have to have homework! It’s another one of the institutional-education assumptions that is maybe correct, but maybe not, too.  And yet another one that works really well for some students, not so much for others.  What went on, day after day, in the homes of all those kids I went to school with who never turned in complete homework?  Day after day, I assumed they were lazy or stupid.  What was really going on there?